Revelation Zero

It's been away for a long, patience-stretching pause – but tonight FlashForward is back, stretching our credulity instead. But the signs for improvement are hopeful: episode 11 is be titled Revelation Zero but this big return actually brings plenty of them. So fingers crossed ...

The episodes in a flash

Agent Mark Benford, having disobeyed many orders, is suspended until signed off by a therapist. Conveniently, the therapist is one with a new, experimental drug that causes fuzzy memories to immediately defuzz. Benford takes it, and sees lots of new useful parts of his flashforward. Like the bits, for example, that help him save Lloyd Simcoe and Simon Campos.

Simcoe, last seen being bundled into a fake ambulance by some burly fake paramedics, is locked up in the basement of a deserted cheese steak restaurant (of course it's deserted! No delicious words are made less appealing by combination than "cheese" and "steak"). He's joined by Campos, and the two of them are tortured by a bad man called Flosso, who tells them their experiments didn't cause the global blackout, but merely amplified it. He wants the settings they used, for almost certainly nefarious reasons.

Campos has his finger cut off with a cigar-cutter by the cigar-loving, emphysema-suffering Flosso, a plot point surely raising future continuity problems that far outweigh any current benefits, but never mind. Flosso demands the numbers that will enable his unseen evil masters to produce another blackout. They refuse. Benford saves them. Phew.

Moving into the second hour, Simon Campos turns out to be Suspect Zero, which is neat and tidy. Campos WAS in Toronto at his father's funeral, but D Gibbons remotely picked him up and deposited him at the baseball with magical blackout-blocking jewellery, and made him watch as the world blacked out around him. While the world flashed, Campos met Flosso, heard this nefarious group of baddies killed his daddy (naughty daddy-deading baddies!) and that they required Campos to be their resident evil scientist, starting that very second. Or else.

Back in the present and Campos tricks Janis into taking him to Toronto, where she meets his lovely mother, his most influential professor and his uncle: Flosso. Not content with being responsible for Simon's dad's death, Flosso promises to kill Si's runaway sister too. Simon squishes the air out of his emphysema-ridden lungs in a surprising assassination.

• New: Timothy the window cleaner, almost died in the blackout, now a motivational religious guru with his 'Sanctuary' movement, that Nicole (babysitter to the Benfords and a character it's still quite difficult to care about much) is drawn to. Also Nicole's mother, making a mural on her wall out of pennies minted in 1989. We know she's supposed to be mentally unbalanced because ... well, because of that. Also, she styles her hair with bulldog clips.

Flash review

Given the different angle on the blackout and new character's point of view in the opening moments, there's a sense that the programme-makers are not only reminding us of where this all began, they're starting over again. And we are: in the time FlashForward's been gone, there's been a change in the creative forces behind the series; a shake-up in the hope of removing some of the bigger problems.

Some shortcuts leap logic and artfully avoid the problematic parts. Of COURSE there's a "modified calcineurin inhibitor" that can get over the tricky problem of Mark not remembering his flashforward. The tangled Suspect Zero web ending with Campos as Zero? Simple, quick, brilliant.

But there are still problems. Was it really necessary for Campos to be quite so slippery? I can't fault Janis' locating skills, but her top-notch FBI-prisoner-retention needs work. It was difficult to see how Campos would have persuaded her to go to Toronto otherwise, but this was basically hide-and-seek for idiots. And can Olivia's life get more complicated than husband-panic and looking after Simcoe's kid? She deserves more.

But I'm still willing to stick with it for a couple of weeks. I like this new Simon Campos: brutal and vengeance-tastic drives the story better than sarcastic and slimy did. And stopping another blackout from happening offers a forward-moving impetus rather than always having the backward-looking "working out what happened" stuff as motivation. All told, this has been a good return: but I still want it to get better.

Flashy ideas and forward thinking

• You have to love a villain who uses the words "I'm a villain". Even if you don't get to love him for very long.

• I'm a scaredy-cat, but when the two men in masks appeared I actually emitted a loud squeak. (It also marked a change of pace that has been otherwise missing from the show).

• Of all the excitably spurious scientific terms to topple from Campos' mouth this week, "Quantum entanglement device" is by far the greatest.

• At least FlashForward is keeping CGI technicians in gainful employment. That green screen is rife isn't news: but this show takes the biscuit.

• "The rules don't apply anymore" was the line that leapt out at me from the flashes of next week's episode. And it feels like the banner that the new creatives running the show have hung above the door. They're going to have to make this work for their target Lost-loving demographic at the same time Lost is storming through a mind-blowing final season. So if you've come back to Flashforward tonight (or come to it new) will you be back next week?